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Ladi Taiwo

A Texas missionary who managed an orphanage in Malawi has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing eight children at the East African facility.

Gerald Campbell, 66, used his position as general manager of the home between 1997 and 2009 to lure his victims into his accommodation and assault them. All the victims were orphans living at the Victory Christian Children's Home. One boy was suffering from HIV.

Campbell admitted he knew what he was doing was wrong, but he thought nobody would believe the victims if they reported the abuse.

He also acknowledged to the authorities he sent money to some of the minors in an attempt to buy their silence.

Campbell was a member of Grace Fellowship Church in Odessa, which had ties with the children's home.

He pleaded guilty on Wednesday in a Texas magistrate's court to one count of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign place. A Justice Department spokesperson says the 66-year-old Odessa man could get up to 30 years in federal prison.

US Homeland Security agents began investigating him in June 2014 after receiving a tip-off. Sentencing hasn't been scheduled yet.

The hashtag #BringBackOurGirls #ChibokgirlAminaAli became the most trending on social media after the news of the news that one of the girls abducted by Boko Haram from Chibok Secondary School has been found.

For the second time in two years, the official plane of Swaziliand's King Mswati III has been detained in Canada over a debt dispute.

Singapore entrepreneur Shanmuga Rethenam, a former business ally of Mswati had the plane grounded through Canadian courts in his latest bid to freeze the king’s foreign assets as he tries to claim nearly $8 million he claimed he’s being owed.

Swaziland government spokesman Percy Simelane denied that the king owed any money and said he could not comment further as the matter was in court.

On 5 May, a Toronto court ordered Mswati’s McDonnell Douglas DC-9-87 to be confined to the Canadian province of Ontario, where it was being serviced by a local firm, according to legal files.

Rethenam said he sold Mswati the plane in 2010 and then paid about $6.5m for modifications and refinancing.

Last year, a similar action yielded $305m payment to Rethenam by Mswati. This time, Rethenam secured a “worldwide freezing order” from a judge in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), which ordered some of Mswati’s foreign assets frozen until it makes a decision on Rethenam’s claim.

Rethenam has been charged with misappropriating funds while he operated a Swazi mining venture with Mswati between 2011 and 2014. He is due to report to the Swazi High Court by 30 June for a pre-trial conference on charges unrelated to Rethenam’s debt dispute with the king.

Rethenam however, thinks otherwise, he said in an interview that the timing of the fraud, theft and tax evasion charges, laid two days before the plane grounding, was suspicious and he believed they were being used to “retaliate” against him.